Abstract
Compared with individual events, compound weather and climate extremes may impose more serious influences on natural systems and human society, especially in populated areas. In this study, we examine the changes in the compound precipitation events that follow extremely hot weather within several days during 1961–2017 in South China by taking the Guangdong Province as an example. Additionally, we assess the impacts of urbanization on these changes. It is found that extreme precipitation events in Guangdong are often preceded by hot weather, with an average fraction of 28.25%. The fraction of such compound events is even larger in more populated and urbanized areas such as the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region. Moreover, our results reveal significant increases in the frequency and fraction of the compound extreme heat and precipitation events. These increases are especially stronger in more developed areas (e.g., PRD), and their increasing trends tend to accelerate in recent decades. Furthermore, the local urbanization contributes to 40.91 and 49.38% of the increases in the frequency and fraction of the compound events, respectively. Our findings provide scientific references for policy-makers and urban planners to mitigate the influences of the compound heat and precipitation extremes by considering their increasing risks under the context of global climate change and local urbanization.
Highlights
Global warming increases the occurrence probability of climate extremes in worldwide ranges, and these climate events seriously impact human communities and the natural environment (IPCC, 2014; World Economic Forum, 2019)
We investigate the changes in sequentially compound extreme heat and precipitation events during 1961–2017 in South China and quantify the contribution of urbanization to the longterm changes of this type of extreme weather for the first time
Our results indicate that extreme precipitation events in South China are often preceded by hot weather within three days, and demonstrate that the local urbanization exerts significant impacts on this compound extremes event
Summary
Global warming increases the occurrence probability of climate extremes in worldwide ranges, and these climate events seriously impact human communities and the natural environment (IPCC, 2014; World Economic Forum, 2019). Precipitation extremes resulted in the devastating floods in the Yangtze River of China in 1998, which caused thousands of deaths and missing countrywide (Orsolini et al, 2015). These resultant influences of climate extremes have been. The hazards resulting from interacted climate extremes may further intensify the magnitude and severity of the risks caused by individual events (Leonard et al, 2014; Alizadeh et al, 2020). While most existing studies paid much attention to individual events, few focused on compound events with magnified impacts compared to the individual events (Weber et al, 2020)
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